Why the paintings of this Dutch master help me see the world differently
During the Covid pandemic, there was a boom in pet adoptions. For a while, there was even a puppy shortage, as people who had long dreamed of adding an animal to their households found themselves more or less locked into their homes, with the time on their hands that a pet, especially a toothy maniacal puppy, requires. It turned out that lot of people had been waiting for just such an opportunity: I was one of these people.
A few months into lockdown, Basso, a lagotto romagnolo with floppy ears and dirty blond curls, entered our household. He was a truffle hunter by breed; by birth, less romantically, he was from the Rotterdam suburbs. A proud parent, I was convinced that there had never been a softer, cuter, smarter puppy in all the history of puppies. He was the sweetest thing that ever chewed a shoe.
Lagotti are athletic: they need at least three nice long walks a day. For owners if almost never for dog, this can get repetitive, and so, in order to avoid circling the same few blocks, we started taking Basso into the countryside, or what passes for the countryside, near Utrecht, where I had moved 20 years before on the heels of a love affair. This was dispiriting. In one of the most densely populated countries in the world, you could always see or hear a freeway, a railway, a power plant.
As Basso ran through forests whose trees all stood in straight lines or along the shores of rectangular lakes, I thought about the energy you need, in this country, to imagine something natural here, to edit those manmade things out of the frame. The neatness and organization foreigners have noted for centuries – so pleasant in Dutch cities – is less pleasant in the countryside, and starts to feel oppressive and inescapable.
At its most wild, Holland is no more wild than Central Park – but without the glacial outcroppings, grassy knolls or wide vistas. There is more nature in the middle of Manhattan than there is in most of this country. At its best, Dutch nature is a nice park, good for taking a jog or throwing a stick to your dog, but it’s not what most people imagine when they hear the word “nature”. If you stay long enough, this becomes an absence you feel physically.
But even without the accretions of modern ugliness, the Dutch countryside’s most striking feature, its flatness, makes it a challenge for painters. On an unvaried surface, only nearby things can be seen, and everything else fades into the distance. You need a little height, a little variation, in order to arrange a view into something worth looking at.
Yet it was in this country where, at the beginning of the 15th century, landscape painting arose. The medieval artist painted bodies to look like sculptures, setting them against backgrounds of gold. But once the need was felt to make them look more real, convincing decors had to be devised. This was the “naturalism” of the Dutch. But it was no more natural than a bar code on an apple. Like the invention of perspective, it was an intellectual revolution.
Any child can draw a thing – a flower, a house, a person. This is the beginning of art. Tens of thousands of years ago, on the walls of the caves